After takin' a swig o' grog, Ian Hilliard belched out this bit o' wisdom: > Back in the mid-90's, Unix had X11 and Motif. There was a clone of Motif > for Linux, but it was on very shakey ground. It was expected to be banned, > as an illegal copy, at any time. Programming X11 directly was a great > recipe for insanity. Motif was a little better, but not much. > > Microsoft came out with Visual Studio, where it was possible for a > programmer, who didn't really understand about programming graphics, to > produce reasonable looking GUIs. That sold Windows to the developers.
That stuff came later. At first you had to deal with the Win32 graphics API. It actually isn't all that bad, but there were a few tasks you had to do in a kind of bassackwards way (such as intercepting the API and telling it to use your brush.) > Unfortunately, Linux still lacks a tool like Visual Studio, which makes > the development of GUI software a matter of putting the bits where you > want them and then compile, all in the same IDE. I know Borland had Kylix, > which was supposed to do this, but it seems to have been still born. To > that, QT has quite a high seat cost, if you want to produce commercial > software. WxWidgets seem to insist on including GTK, which instantly makes > it GPL. I'm not sure an IDE is a panacea, though. There are quite a few available to Linuxers, but I haven't used one yet. Don't really need one for console/daemon apps anyway. -- Q: Why does a GNU/Linux user compile his kernel? A: Because he can. _______________________________________________ Gnu-misc-discuss mailing list Gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
